Envisioning Metropolis—New York as Seen, Imaged and Imagined

Abstract

The essay first sketches the geography of literary New York from the Bowery and the Lower East Side to Harlem; then fills out the geographic space with chapters of New York’s literary history from modernism and its myth of metropolis (in Dos Passos, Joseph Stella and Hart Crane) to the collapse of this vision of an urban sublime during the Great Depression. It subsequently discusses more playful versions of the urban in Pop Art and literary texts of the 1970s and 1980s, before it turns to contemporary fiction where the modernist tradition of an urban sublime is deconstructed and metropolitan space reconceived as part of a larger transnational system of information, global money flows and migratory movements. In novels of Don DeLillo, Cristina García, Kiran Desai and Colson Whitehead, the city is seen as a space of abstract interconnectedness as well as of alienation at its social and economic margins; as a culturally conflicted space in which it is nevertheless possible to negotiate a cultural existence in-between. Here New York is experienced concretely and traumatically, yet also, paradoxically, accepted as home. Throughout, the essay conceives of this history as following the parallel tracks of local (and/or ethnic) narration and of narratives trying to encompass the city from a totalizing perspective. Although this latter tradition of an urban sublime loses impetus in the course of the twentieth century, it nevertheless remains a distinct counterpoint in the history of New York’s literary representations.

Keywords

• literature and art of the urban sublime
• New York as a space of literary and artistic history
• New York as global city and migratory space in contemporary fiction.
• New York as space of local and ethnic narration
• postmodernist abstractions and landscapes of surfaces
• realism/naturalism